Laments of a philosophical pessimist. Notes on society, politics, and culture.

Sunday, January 31, 2016

The Flint Crisis and the Neoliberal Model

What to do with the extraneous population of the dispossessed once the sources of its livelihood have been systematically plundered, de-skilled, downsized, outsourced? In the neoliberal model there are two steps.

First, the criminalization of what remains of the lives of those within this population and then the consignment of as many as possible to a burgeoning for-profit incarceration system so another layer of profit can be scraped off it.

Secondly, those who remain are condemned to a--quite literal--slow death by depriving it of the infrastructure necessary to its health and longevity.

Death by economic deprivation, ethnic cleansing by another means. Capital tidying up its "externalities" in the wake of its "creative destruction." Utterly disposable cities inhabited by dark-skinned people slowly ablated from the map.